“I use ‘nerd’ and ‘geek’ interchangeably — I don’t make a distinction. I’ve said that being a nerd is not about what you love, it’s about the way that you love it. So you can be a nerd for football, and obsessively follow stats and player trades and figure out things that give you an advantage in, like, sports betting and things like that. Or, you can love Battlestar Galactica and try to work out all of the complex mythologies and get into things like blueprints of the ships. And then you can love things like Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. and Winter Soldier, and love that so much that you end up going to a comic book shop and then reading all the way back through ten or twenty years of Captain America comics. Someone who I would describe as a ‘geek’ or ‘nerd’ is a person who loves something to its greatest extent, and then looks for other people who love it the same way, so they can celebrate loving it together.”

Did you see that Wil Wheaton and Felicia Day raised $1.4 Million on Kickstarter for an Internet series called Tabletop, in which they’ll introduce board gaming to various “geeky guests”? (To you kids out there: “Board gaming” is like video games, but not on a computer. I know, right?) This was apparently some sort of crowdfunding record, as no one previously had raised more than $1 million for an online series.

Some people see this as evidence that geek culture has become an economic power. I see this from another point of view: People just want to see Wil Wheaton playing games. What if I told you, dear reader, there’s a webcomic out there that can deliver that very experience? It’s Wheaton as Wesley Crusher playing some role-playing games with the rest of the Star Trek: The Next Generation crew in Josh Millard’s LARP Trek.

This Sunday, December 12, TNT is giving Leverage fans a holiday treat of new Season 3 episodes. First up is The Ho Ho Ho Job (the December 12 episode, which TNT previewed with this clip, is set to air at 9 PM EST ), followed by the two-hour season finale on December 19. Given that neither myself nor Graeme make it a secret how much we enjoy the show, series co-creator John Rogers was more than happy to answer my questions in a recent email exchange. While I had his attention, we also touched upon his Dungeons & Dragons work for IDW(the column is supposed to be about talking comics at some point, of course [also be sure to check out CBR’s late October 2010 John Rogers interview where he discussed the ongoing comic in greater detail]). One final thing, if you are not a frequent visitor to Rogers’ blog, Kung Fu Monkey, you should be. The man finds a way to make his show’s hate mail worthwhile reading. As for the upcoming episodes, I was hooked at the name Dave Foley.

Tim O’Shea: In this latest batch of new episodes, who of the core cast do we get to delve deeper into their back stories?

John Rogers: We’ve implied for a long time that Christian Kane’s character, Eliot Spencer, did violence professionally for a long time. We get to see him work with his usual moral restraints off … In the second half of the season finale, it’s very Sophie-centric. Not so much her backstory but just a nice bit on her evolution as a character.